Consulting services

We are convinced that software is critical to achieving a great user experience in vehicles!

We help our customers leverage the full potential of software in complex scenarios. As infotainment and driver assistance systems become more complex and the need for integration with the car and its surroundings rises, it becomes more critical to learn from other industries and apply best practices.

EB offers consulting services in many areas

Project management

After completing several hundred projects of varying sizes, we know how to set up the management structure to meet your specific needs. It’s crucial to establish the right control mechanisms early and continuously adjust to changes in the team or the project environment. It’s also important to establish structures that encourage communication and enable the development teams to move toward a joint development goal while staying on time, at high quality, and within budget. EB’s global footprint enables us to support our customers in defining and setting up sustainable project organizations.

Agile methodology and processes

EB has successfully implemented the lean development model for automotive software projects. In our daily business, we must combine state-of-the-art software development methodologies, such as combining SCRUM and KANBAN with Automotive SPICE. We have the experience to combine classic approaches with modern methods such as epics and user stories. We provide support for our customers to implement traceability and get the best value for their money through a reliable, process-driven yet agile organization.

Process automation

EB believes in processes and agile development methodology. However, in order to scale to large projects of 50 or 100 developers, the organization needs the right tooling. Especially when teams are distributed, processes alone aren’t enough. One key to success in our own projects is to establish a high level of automation for recurring tasks. We speed up tasks that typically take a long time. We support our customers in moving to continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) by setting up project-specific Software Factories that include the right tools for analyzing, checking, building, integrating, validating, testing, monitoring, delivering, and archiving complex software projects.

Architecture

EB has successfully defined infotainment architectures that leverage separation of elements, maintainability, and the reusability of specific assets. The right kind of architecture is critical to successful large-scale software projects. The architecture defines the boundaries for developers and provides rules and cornerstones to which applications and software modules must conform. The architecture has to enable modularity, and it has to define interfaces and create a platform that can be used reliably by application developers.

System analysis

With the growing complexity of projects, it becomes more and more difficult to really understand what is going on in a target system. Often, even the development teams only know what is happening in a certain area of a complex system. Architects create an understanding of how the internals of a system should work together. But who uncovers what is actually happening inside a complex system? Who can judge the impact of a change when the team has moved on to another project?

Confronted with this situation, EB decided that we need a special tool to provide insight for customers into the technical workings of complex systems. The EB RACE tool enables our consultants to do exactly that: analyze system structure as well as run-time information, identify defects, judge resource consumption, and correlate all timing-related information so that you can draw conclusions and derive recommendations for improvement. We are able to provide software architects and development teams with a new view of their system and can reliably measure KPIs for optimization and reusability, as well as visualize architectural coherence.

Software quality

To achieve a high level of product quality in a complex automotive system it’s not enough to define requirements and have a supplier agree to them. It’s important to address the specific requirements that make a difference in maintainability, reusability, extendability, and performance, as well as the overall user experience. At the same time, the wrong kind of requirement might increase development costs tremendously without actually achieving the goal. EB has significant experience in complex automotive systems, and we help our customers identify and achieve the specific quality goals of their development projects or that of their suppliers.

Success Stories

BMW wanted to substitute selected Standard Core modules with their own modules and needed a partner to take over the integration. EB became the main supplier of the BMW Standard Core and was contracted to develop the majority of BMW’s basic software modules.... Read more